organizations through noticing and interpreting them in the Business and .... Some make delicate origami figures and others screw the paper into a ball and drop ...
Vince, R. (2016) ‘The art and practice of critique – the possibilities of critical psychodynamic education’. In Chris Steyaert, Timon Beyes, Martin Parker (Eds.) The Routledge Companion to Reinventing Management Education, London: Routledge
Chapter 16: The art and practice of critique – The possibilities of critical psychodynamic education Russ Vince
In this chapter I reflect on learning and critique in the management classroom. Critique in management education is sustained through a continuous desire to doubt or unsettle prevailing knowledge, as well as a wish to surface the emotions and power relations that maintain such knowledge. This makes it possible to call into question, for example: the established knowledge of professors; the nature of the knowledge desired by students and practitioners; and the preferred approaches to the delivery of knowledge that have become compulsory within Business and Management Schools. I argue that one way to introduce critique into management education is by reflecting on the emotions and power relations that surround attempts to learn about leading, managing and organizing. Such reflection can reveal the complexities of behaviour and action that are integral to management and organization and that are also brought, both consciously and unconsciously, into teaching and learning groups. My main aim in this chapter is to illustrate the relationship between learning and critique through examples from my own practice, as well as encouraging other management educators to be influenced by ‘the art and practice of critique’. In my experience, bringing learning and critique together in the Business and Management School classroom involves two key assumptions. First, the ability to engage with emotions and power relations in the classroom depends on the management educator’s willingness to hold students in the moment, to generate ‘here and now’ experiences from which they can feel their reflections as a prerequisite to understanding them. There is an ambiguity in this idea of ‘holding’. In part it refers to holding students’ (as well as one’s own) attention on what is happening here and now. It also refers to the creation of environments in which students’ emotional responses to what is happening here and now can be held – which is to say, kept available for critical reflection rather than lost in students’ desire to move away from emotion as quickly as possible. Generating ‘here and now’ experience is a key element of the ‘group relations’ perspective on management learning (French and Vince 1999). The theoretical roots of this perspective come from the psychodynamic study of organizations (Neumann and Hirschhorn 1999), which stresses the impact of conscious and unconscious, individual and collective emotions on workplace behaviour. More recently, psychosocial studies (Kenny and Fotaki 2014) have provided a more critical edge by recognizing the inseparability of affect and power in organizations.
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In practical terms, the reason why critical reflection is important is because it can help to engage with a general problem for managers, which is that they often work in task-obsessed, overly rational and conflict-averse environments (sometimes of their own making). It also helps to dispel the notion that learning can be provided through universally applicable models, through problem-solving tools, or with a set of defined skills and capabilities for successful implementation. The interplay between learning and critique provides the basis for learning about the contradictory, messy, emotion-laden and power-filled environments in which we work, as well as providing a way to make relations of domination transparent. Second, one of the characteristics of critical reflection is that it is likely to mobilize the power relations that it is seeking to transform (Nicolini et al. 2004). Critical reflection surfaces a tension at the heart of organizations that management students need to know about – that managers are absorbed in the power relations they are seeking to transform at the same time as they are capable of unsettling established relations of power. Without this insight, managers might believe, for example: that their behaviour and actions are assisted by a defined range of management skills and capabilities rather than also restricted by them. We reproduce the power relations around us at the same time as we attempt to challenge or change them. The possibilities of critical education depend on the willingness of management educators to help students and practitioners to notice and to interpret emotional and political dynamics in organizations through noticing and interpreting them in the Business and Management School classroom. As management educators we can provide opportunities for students of management to learn, for example: how organizations are emotional places (not how individuals within organizations can ‘manage’ emotion); how strategies and actions are subverted by unacknowledged emotions; how individuals and groups internalize and enact organizational dynamics; how links between individuals’ behaviour and organizational structures are created and recreated; and how initiatives designed for change come to represent or replicate existing anxieties, stuck relations, limited ways of working, or repressive/ regressive practices and patterns of compliance and control. In order to address at least some of the above list, it will be important for management educators to utilize the feelings and behaviour that students bring with them (consciously and unconsciously) into the learning environment; how they interact with others from such feelings and behaviour; and the ways in which such feelings and behaviours structure, limit and create opportunities for learning. I argue that holding students in the moment and mobilizing opportunities for critical reflection in order to comprehend emotions and power relations in organizations offers one strategy for connecting learning and critique. This is what I am focused on in this chapter, but it is important to recognize that my approach is set with in a range of broader ways of thinking and working that come under the heading of ‘critical management education’ (see chapter Perriton and Singh, this volume). In the rest of the chapter, after some brief reflections on critical management education, I discuss ways of connecting learning and critique in large, undergraduate classes, for MBA students, and through different spatial arrangements of the postgraduate classroom. Some brief reflections on Critical Management Education The various possibilities and difficulties of bringing critical approaches into Business and Management Schools have already been well explored and explained (See: Antonacopoulou
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2002 and 2010; Brocklehurst, Sturdy, Winstanley and Driver 2007; Clegg, Dany and Grey 2011; Cunliffe, Forray and Knights 2002; Currie and Knights 2003; Currie, Knights and Starkey 2010; Dehler 2009; Grey 2002, 2004 and 2008; Hay 2008; Hibbert 2013; Miller, Hagen and Johnson 2003; Reynolds 1999; Reynolds and Vince 2004; Sinclair 2007; Vince 2010). The importance of critical perspectives has been in their ability to show that managers’ capacity to reason is not solely concerned with efficiency and effectiveness, but also bound up with power, control and inequality (Fournier and Grey 2000). CME has questioned assumptions about managers’ learning, both in terms of the content and processes of management education (French and Grey 1996). A key focus has been on ways in which management education reflects and reproduces the operation of power relations in work organizations (Reynolds and Trehan 2001; Grey 2004; Reynolds and Vince 2004; Gherardi and Poggio 2007). The teaching and learning that takes place in Business Schools is never divorced from the complexities of self/other relations, from business school power relations, or from power relations more broadly within society. Existing literature from CME has provided some guiding ideas about the relationship between CME and Business Schools. First, it is important ‘to consider the modes of domination that exist in our own institutions and our own classrooms’ (Cunliffe, Forray and Knights 2002: 489) if we are to be able to engage with managers in seeking improved understanding of power relations in organizations. Second, we need to accept ‘that management is not about neutral techniques but about values’ (Grey 2004: 180). CME reconfigures management education in terms of attention to values and to organizational context. This invites us to question the values and assumptions communicated implicitly and explicitly within Business Schools. Third, it is important to question the desirability and the possibility of control (Grey 2004) and especially the ways in which control has come to define the role of ‘teacher’. Finally, because CME seeks to communicate about power, values and control, it can speak clearly on the everyday experiences and political processes involved in practice (Antonacopoulou 2006). Critical approaches to management raise the possibility of undermining the conventional view of organizations ‘as rationally ordered, appropriately structured, and emotion free life spaces, where the right decisions are made for the right reasons by the right people, in a reliable and predictable manner’ (Kersten 2001: 452). Studies that have been concerned specifically with the relationship between emotion and power have shown that emotion is essential to control processes, and that emotions need to be understood in terms of the social and political structures of which they are a part (Fineman and Sturdy 1999). Emotions underpin and influence behaviour in organizations in ways that create distinctive political dynamics and organizing processes. For example, I have highlighted how a company’s vision of itself as a learning company was undermined by defensiveness and the political unwillingness of senior managers to acknowledge learning as an aspect of their own role (Vince 2002). This contributed to a ‘politics of imagined stability’ where a veneer of collegiality covered over behaviour ‘based on the personal need to retain control and on collective fear of conflict, failure and loss of authority and influence’ (Vince 2002: 1202). Emotions guide individuals in appraising social situations and responding to them, and are therefore part of an inter-personal, meaning creating process (Antonacopoulou and Gabriel 2001). These organizing processes connect to broader political relations, such as the engineering and marketing of corporate culture (Van Maanen and Kunda 1989; Kunda 1992) and gendered emotions in organizations (Reynolds and Trehan 2001; Swan 2005; Lewis and Simpson 2007).
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CME has sought to question modes of domination in the classroom in order to reveal power relations that are part of management and management education. It focuses on values rather than techniques, as well as the consequent need to address the context of both management and management education. CME calls into question the desirability and possibility of control and it emphasizes the link between political processes within management education and the politics of management practice. Because critical reflection mobilizes the power relations it is seeking to transform, the implementation of CME within Business and Management Schools can be challenging to say the least. For example, Amanda Sinclair (2007) has narrated this challenge beautifully in her paper on educational experiences with MBA students. These experiences include both pedagogical heaven (‘thrilling and full of risk’, p. 464) and hell (‘intensive and very content orientated’, p. 465). She highlights the anxiety levels and holding possible in these two environments, one where her methods ‘provoked anxiety that I was able to contain with help and within a structure with which I was familiar’ (p. 469) and the other where the same methods ‘were a trigger for anxieties that lay present, circulating but largely unprocessed within a new and difficult structure’ (p. 469). Despite, or maybe because of such challenges, CME adds value to the education of management students and practitioners because it confronts what and how individuals and groups expect to learn. It engages with emotions and politics in the classroom in order to connect with the broader institutional context within which such relations and dynamics are created and maintained. Approaches to management education that do not involve the emotions and politics of being a manager are likely to reduce the potential for managers to learn and to be aware of how they (and the organizations they work in) create limits on learning. Individual managers’ feelings, knowledge and behaviour in the classroom are often a reliable mirror of emotions, behaviour and dispositions in the organizations these managers come from (Reynolds and Trehan 2001). Managers bring: feelings of anxiety and ambivalence, an eagerness to discover, helpful and unhelpful existing knowledge, defensiveness, care, good ideas and competitiveness (to name but a few). In addition, the temporary organization that management students and management educators co-create in the classroom has an organizational dynamic – it is more than the sum of its individual parts. In learning groups, implicit structures and habits emerge very quickly and without knowing; they become established as rules and relations that determine ‘the way we do things here’. Such dynamics are contextually specific and political and they both limit and legitimize behaviour and action. Reflecting on the way this happens in the Business and Management School classroom provides an opportunity to better understand and work through these dynamics within organizations. In the following section I provide a number of specific examples in order to illustrate these points. Some examples from my own practice Undergraduate My first example is an exercise that I use often with large, undergraduate groups in lecture theatres. The exercise is designed both to sit alongside and to critique lectures on organizational behaviour that focus on single themes (e.g. perception, communication, motivation, group formation, etc.). The aim is to show students the complexity and messiness of behaviour in organizations and, in particular, the emotions that inform both organizational behaviour and action.
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The session lasts fifty minutes. When the students come into the lecture theatre I arrange for them each to have one sheet of blank A4 paper. After they have settled down, I say: ‘using the resources I have given you, you have ten minutes to create something beautiful’. The students interpret this task in many different ways. For example: paper planes soon start to float across the lecture theatre. Some students sit with the sheet of paper in their hands, unclear what they are meant to be doing. I notice students drawing, using different colored pens they happened to have with them. Some tear shapes into the paper or fold it neatly. Some make delicate origami figures and others screw the paper into a ball and drop it. They talk with their neighbours (‘what is this nonsense’, ‘what are we supposed to be doing’, ‘do you know what’s going on’?) Some have abandoned the A4 sheet and are reading or responding to emails or sending text messages on their phones, others are looking around the room, somewhat bemused. Students’ reaction in class to a request from an authority figure to undertake a task gives them the opportunity for public reflection on the variety of feelings and responses that are mobilized by such requests – for example: confusion, ambivalence, creativity, innovation, frustration, excitement and anxiety. Their various emotions and perceptions, as well as the actions they generate, can be used during the remaining time to discuss the complexities of feeling and behaviour that were mobilized. Their reactions as a group of students provide a remarkably accurate picture of behaviour in response to what people imagine is required of them in organizations. For example: paper planes are inevitable, they are a predictable response. In addition, there are: ambivalent responses (sending text messages), creative responses (elaborate color pictures), and inquiring responses (talking with others to clarify or criticize the point of the task). There are many different interpretations possible of the things we are asked to do in organizations, as well as fantasies and expectations concerning what may be the ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ ways to do them. This exercise helps undergraduate students of organizational behaviour to understand that managing and being managed often involve complicated relationships, varied interpretations, limited resources and unclear commands. It provides the students with immediate evidence from their own individual and collective experience that behaviour in organizations is messy and complicated. In this exercise, holding undergraduate students in a moment of uncertainty for just ten minutes produces an extraordinarily wide range of responses that illustrate the feelings and reactions that are mobilized by a simple (yet ambiguous) request. The critique mobilized by this exercise is twofold. First, the students’ notions of organizational behaviour as being a subject (of study) are unsettled by the discovery that they themselves are the subjects of, and that they are subjected to, organizational behaviour. For example, the exercise evokes strong feelings from some students, particularly anger or frustration at the tutor’s ‘inability to give us clear instruction’. However, moving beyond a passive relationship between tutor and student helps to raise questions about ‘us and them’ that will be integral to their working lives. Students are able to engage with my position and power in the room as part of understanding the experience of leading/ following and managing/ being managed in organizations. On one hand, ‘we expect you to tell us what we need to know about OB’ and on the other, ‘I realize that the way we reacted in this exercise is just like reactions in the organization I worked in’. Second, students are able to move beyond expectations about learning in didactic ways and to understand better that the feeling they express that ‘we don’t know what we were supposed to be doing’ or ‘we didn’t know what
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the outcomes were going to be’ is quite usual in organizations. They are able to reflect on a variety of reactions in relation to how we do things here – to the emotions and power relations that underpin expectations about behaviour and the structural dispositions that create and are created by such behaviour. The classroom becomes a temporary organization, with the same sort of relational and political dynamics that students are likely to encounter (or have already encountered) in placements, work experience or the direct experience of work. For example, when one does not know what is expected, it becomes important to ask, interpret or experiment, which is not always easy to do. Expectations are built in the relationship between managers and managed, they might reflect the difficulty that powerful individuals have in delegating authority, or conversely that people within positions of authority can feel out of their depth. The exercise brings the complexities and contradictions of behaviour in organizations to the surface and emphasizes the importance of reflection in the midst of action or incomprehension; it asks students (and the tutor) to reflect on the consequences of their reactions; and it provides an opportunity to raise and discuss the politics of action and inaction. Master of Business Education (MBA) I run a five-day elective for MBA students called ‘Leadership in Context’. This is open to both our Full-time and Executive MBA students. The maximum size of the student group is 24. The design uses experiential learning (in the ‘Group Relations’ tradition – see French and Vince 1999) to critically reflect on and to examine group processes and dynamics within the classroom in order to generate insights about leadership and organizations. In particular, the module invites MBA students to notice and to reflect on the emotions and politics of leadership in the context of everyday organizational relations and practices. There are a number of assumptions about leadership that this approach seeks to get across to MBA students. In effect, these offer a critique of the mainstream approach to leadership, which emphasizes the individual leader in the context of positive skills and behaviour. It is also designed to address the unspoken plea or desire that MBA students inevitably place onto me as the ‘Professor of Leadership’, which is to ‘give me the skills I need to be a better leader’. The assumptions that inform the module are: first, that leadership is not only an individual skill that has a specific set of abilities and competences. Rather, it is a practice that changes according to the emotional, political and practical context in which it is situated. Second, organizations and groups create dynamics or ways of working that limit as well as support leadership behaviour and action. Understanding these dynamics is important because leaders often experience contradictions in their roles. For example, we are often asked to be both the champions of change and the guardians of the status quo. Third, an awareness of the organizational context of leadership helps students to feel and to perceive the complexities of emotions and relations that are part of leadership in practice. They can therefore understand the importance of continuous, critical reflection on leadership practice. This approach can be both challenging and enlightening. For this example, I am going to talk about an exercise that is designed to be the transition point, halfway through the unit, between students’ confusion about the relevance of the two days of experiential exercises they have undergone and their insights that inform the two days they have left to transform their ideas about leadership in practice.
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Before I do this, I want to briefly illustrate what students encounter in the build up to this transition point, which involves experiential exercises in small groups, as a whole group, and within an ‘institutional’ exercise. For example, I ask students to organize themselves into small groups. The process of getting themselves into groups is often interesting in terms of the choices (or the lack of choices) that are made. Once small groups have formed, I ask them to give themselves a name and an identity (I do not specify what I mean by identity). They spend the time carefully and carelessly working out the best name for themselves; and they often highlight particular aspects of their identity – that they are a group where all are equal, a group with a shared interest in learning, a diverse group, a positive group, etc. They give themselves names like ‘the A Team’, the ‘Nice Group’ or they devise their own words that are an anagram of their combined names. I then ask them to say how they as a group are different from the other groups in the room. Each small group quickly develops strong convictions and beliefs about their own labels and (consciously and unconsciously) they use them to reinforce the differences between ‘us’ and the ‘other’ groups. Their fantasy of consensus in ‘our group’ is unstable enough to need to be reinforced through suspicion of the other groups. The force that constructs ‘other’ groups as different comes from apprehension about unexplored differences within ‘my’ group. I have found that this exercise is useful in showing how quickly political relations are created and mobilized within and between sub-groups from emotional responses to ‘other’; to protect the (at times fragile) distinctiveness that ‘we’ have made; and to provide an example of why silos develop, why it is often difficult within organizations to move or communicate between subsystem boundaries. After two and a half days of experiential exercises, students can be feeling confused about their learning. It is at this transition point that they undertake some very specific work in small groups. The aim of their work together in these small groups (3 to 4 people in each group) is to help each other to apply the experience of the experiential exercises they have encountered to their own work experience and practice. Each member of the group takes it in turn to speak for about five to ten minutes about a real and current work problem or issue. I ask them to choose a problem that really matters; that feels difficult and is not readily amenable to being resolved. (For the full-time MBA students this can be an issue from past experience). The other group members listen to the problem without interruption. When the individual has finished communicating the problem then the other group members can speak. However, they do not directly question the individual about the problem. They only talk about their perceptions and experiences of the individual within the experiential exercises they have undertaken in the module. Therefore, group members do not talk directly about the problem; they communicate what they noticed and how they perceived that particular individual within the specific context of the experiential exercises. The format is intended to allow individuals to think about and to make their own connections between behaviour and experience within the module and behaviour and experience at work. This exercise is designed as a critique of expectations and practice. The way in which I am holding students in the moment here arises from asking them to focus only on the shared experience of the previous two days, while also talking about a significant issue or problem from past experience. Students’ reflect on their behaviour during the previous two days to support their understanding of behavioral issues at work (that they may or may not be aware of). Students initially expect to give each other the benefit of their opinions about the specific problem presented. However, to do this would limit the ability of all the people
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involved to engage emotionally with the issue and to provide each other with practical evidence of how their behaviour has been experienced in the learning group. Students also begin to understand how much of their practice is informed by a compulsion to act in habitual ways that limit and exclude many different possibilities for reflection and action. For example: ‘My colleagues observed that my desire to be liked, and avoid conflict, may have prevented me from dealing with the situation upfront. I found the exercise powerful, reflecting in three areas: (a) I care about what people think of me and whether I am liked, (b) It is this that often makes me sweep difficult issues under the rug, which may cause adverse effects and (c) a realization that this desire was perhaps in response to negative childhood memories’. ‘In brief, my defensive response is withdrawal that presents itself externally as a sense of removal, of superiority, of arrogance, of unavailability, of unwillingness to compromise. For me this is the last line of defence when I am unable to use humour or charm. I give up and the situation becomes irresolvable’. Asking them to examine how they behaved both individually and collectively in the experiential exercises in order to better comprehend their problem or issue helps MBA students to see with greater clarity how tied up they are in the emotional and political dynamics of the problem. The Master of Arts Degree in Advanced Management Practice (MAMP) MAMP is a Masters level program with around forty students. The sessions I am describing here were undertaken over three days (one each day) and in two-hour sessions. Using the same instruction for each session, I created three different arrangements of the chairs in the classroom to represent (i.e. to make visible and manifest) a range of emotional and political dynamics in organizations. In each of the three designs the participants were given the instruction: ‘you have an hour to work together as a group on any task and/or issue you want. The only rules are that you stay together as a group and that you cannot move the chairs from their current arrangement’. By creating differences of space and place, each of the three designs for learning aimed to engage with different aspects of emotion and politics in the classroom (as a reflection of emotions and politics in organizations). The three designs generated differences in the ways in which the space is perceived, which is to say, its ‘relative’ qualities (Harvey 2005). In addition, emotions and inter-personal politics were mobilized in the lived or relational space of each design. These were particularly visible in the tensions that emerged from different spatial arrangements (I discuss these below). After they have ended, all three exercises have around an hour for the participants to reflect together and with the tutor, and to discuss and to make sense of the emotions, relations and politics stimulated within these different spatial arrangements for learning. Here, I am using different designs of the physical space of the classroom in order to hold students in the moment. I am asking them to reflect on the different dynamics that are generated within and by different spatial arrangements and to recognise the different patterns of leadership and interaction that emerge from these spaces. Design 1: The Lecture Theatre: In this, the first of the three sessions, the chairs are arranged in a ‘lecture theatre’ style. However, I (as tutor) am not standing in front of the participants,
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but sitting in the rows with them. In order to mark the beginning of the hour I say the instruction (above) and let them know the time when the exercise will end. The students are accustomed to having someone in the role of tutor at the front of the lecture theatre rather than within the rows and we all continue to look towards the front. The most frequent outcome of the ‘lecture theatre’ arrangement of the chairs in the classroom is that sooner or later someone will get up and go to the front in order to address the group and to attempt to manage their task. The individual that puts him or herself in this place (or who is persuaded to go there by the group) both replaces the missing tutor and temporarily becomes the tutor. Such an act is double edged because, while other participants are relieved to have someone who will take on this role, the individual is now ‘different’ and in danger of being punished for her inability to remain ‘one of us’ or for his hubris at placing himself ‘above us’. The act of coming to the front in the class provides much of the material for the final hour of reflection and discussion. It connects with the common experience in organizations where an individual is promoted from being a team member to being a team leader. This individual suddenly has to change from being ‘one of us’ to being in an authority role. The act of going to the front (of taking a lead, or being persuaded to do so by the group) does help to reduce feelings of confusion and uncertainty that the tutor’s behaviour has caused. The spatial arrangements of the lecture theatre design lend themselves to being dependent on and sustained by the individual or individuals at the front. Such dependency not only relates to the function an individual at the front might perform in helping others to define and decide what they are doing. The individual at the front also serves the purpose of providing a focal point for blame if and when things disappoint, fall short or go wrong. The shared fantasy that sustains the behaviour of the group is that creating a replacement for the tutor will enable the group to successfully manage the confusion and uncertainty that is present. This is a space where the focus is on activity at ‘the front’. In its determination to maintain a focus on the front as the place where learning is generated and delivered, the group rejects its own potential to generate learning. Design 2: The Circle of Chairs: In the second session, the chairs are arranged in a large circle, and the tutor is sitting within this circle. The same instruction is given to the group and the exercise lasts the same amount of time. The circle of chairs allows all to see and to be engaged with all other members of the learning group. In this design, the circle means that everyone is seen to be a member of the group, and for some members increased visibility and proximity to others means increased uncertainty and discomfort. Like the ‘lecture theatre’ configuration, the circle of chairs generates anxiety for the students initially as a result of not having a clear task. However, in this place the intensified emotions of visibility and proximity mean that they feel pulled by an imagined responsibility or expectation to achieve a task (however mundane that task may be). As feelings of anxiety emerge, participants repeat tried and tested strategies for avoiding this anxiety: writing ideas on the flip-chart, going round the group so everyone has a chance to say something, finding an individual from within the group who will be the leader, blaming the tutor, etc. (see Vince 2010). For example, it is very common for someone in the group to say that ‘we should all go around and say one idea about what to do’ and then lead the exercise by writing the ideas down on the flip chart. There are often group members who want to try to be fair to everyone at the same time as imposing their suggestion on the group. Such behaviour is an accurate representation of the speed with which implicit structures and ways of working are set up to defend against the anxiety that uncertainty brings to groups and
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to organizations. In addition, (as the tutor) I am closer, more visible, and more present within this space. The failings of the tutor are often discussed in this configuration, and the tutor is used more deliberately as someone ‘different’, since this helps the group to avoid looking at the differences between group members. The key managerial tension in this second configuration of chairs is about how (individually and collectively) to avoid or to try to manage conflict and difference. One particular assumption that participants make about this circular design is that it removes power differences and emphasises the equality inherent in learning with and from our peers. In fact, social and strategic power relations and differences are not ‘removed’. Rather, they are replaced with a shared fantasy of equality that sustains the idea that there are few significant differences in the group. This design encourages the notion that ‘we are all the same here’ – that we are all learning together in the same way and with the same opportunities. Unconsciously, the group defends itself against the differences (e.g. of power, knowledge, understanding, enthusiasm, social and cultural diversity) that are invariably part of the group, and may contribute to its effective or ineffective functioning. This particular arrangement of chairs reveals students’ desire to minimize and to avoid conflict and difference. The circle of chairs lends itself to attempts to include everyone in decision-making, to emphasize that ‘we are all here to learn together’. The shared fantasy that sustains the behaviour of the group is that in our group there is togetherness and equality; that we only have to work together in order to defeat confusion and successfully perform our task. However, students also mobilize the potential circularity of collaboration (literally at times, we are all going round in circles). In the determination to make everyone in the group happy, equal or involved, the students collectively reject conflicts and differences that might make a difference to their learning. The participants’ emphasis on the collaborative nature of this design for learning obscures the fact that collaboration and compliance are bound together in this format. The fantasy that ‘we are all equal’, although it begins as a productive response to the discomfort of having to negotiate with others around a task, is a restriction – it eventually discourages differences of behaviour, opinion and action. Tensions emerge from trying to avoid conflict and differences in the group and through the promotion of togetherness. The exclusion of difference and the avoidance of conflict are very common organizational dynamics, where the tendency is to emphasise the need for ‘positive’ thought and action and to ignore the destructiveness that is part of behaviour in organizations. Design 3: The Woman Sign: In the third session, the chairs are arranged into the symbol for ‘woman’ (a circle with a cross below it…) I am sitting in the circular part of the design. The group receives the same instruction and the exercise lasts the same amount of time. Participants find the material space of this design to be unsettling, especially those individuals who have entered the room last and are positioned in the ‘cross’ part of the design rather than the ‘circle’. The arrangement of chairs in this symbol deliberately reintroduces (gendered) power relations as an underlying aspect of all reflections, decisions and actions that occur within the group. The students are not usually aware of why the chairs are so arranged, and it often takes a while for the symbol to be noticed and acknowledged. This configuration of chairs represents a perpetual emotional and political issue within organizations, the desire to avoid interacting with the dynamics between men and women in the group.
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I have been struck by the consistency in different groups’ responses to this configuration of chairs. At some point in the exercise, two or three individuals notice the structure as ‘the woman sign’ but they do not communicate this fact to the whole group. For example, I was sitting near Indira and I heard her whisper to her friend, ‘it’s the woman sign’. Neither Indira nor her friend mentions this to the rest of the group. One way to think about this is that the group spends some of the exercise ‘knowing’ about the spatial design in a sub-group but not in the whole group. In other words, there are participants who know that the design is ‘the woman sign’ but do not want to say this out-loud. However, the structure is sooner or later noticed by or brought to the attention of the group as a whole, but an individual or a subgroup then dismisses the design as unimportant (‘that’s irrelevant!’), which makes speaking about it more difficult. The shared fantasy inherent in this configuration is that the gendered power dynamics that emerge are at the same time both too obvious and too complicated to discuss. To use an analogy, it is a bit like important inter-personal or organizational issues or relations that get mentioned at the water-cooler after the meeting, rather than in the meeting itself. This arrangement is a complex place, one that reflects the embodied differences that constitute the social. The dynamics of this configuration seem to offer an accurate representation of gendered power relations in organizations, where it is equally difficult to negotiate, comprehend and interact with the way such power relations impact on thought, behaviour, action and inaction. There is a strong desire to ignore, avoid or dismiss gendered power relations, to fight against or flee from having to include such issues as a legitimate aspect of management learning. The significance of the spatial arrangement of the chairs is rejected, even when it is perceived. The shared fantasy that sustains the behaviour of the group is that to talk about gendered power relations would take it to an uncomfortable, unwanted and difficult place where tensions between men and women might explode in the group thereby destroying it and rendering it incapable of delivering its task. This design is a challenge because it is explicit about the power relations that are part of experience in a group where men and women managers are working together. The three chair arrangements I use over the three sessions can be thought of separately as different spatial designs for learning. However, it is the emphasis on their inter-connection that provides particular insights about the emotions and politics of managing and organizing. All three designs signify spatial arrangements linked to intersecting structures and relations of power. They help managers to understand how power relations are ‘part of the medium within which all social relations occur’ (Hoggett and Thompson 2002). Each design reveals tensions concerning different processes and relations of power. The lecture theatre design is hierarchical – revealing both a need for the charismatic power of individual leadership, and the passivity, dependency and compliance that are created from it. Existing power relations within groups tend to be reinforced in this place. It also points to the tension within an individual management or leadership role between being part of ‘them’ or part of ‘us’. The circle of chairs mixes both collaboration and compliance – revealing the collective capacity to create something of value together, and a fantasy of sameness that avoids conflicts and discourages risk. Avoiding conflict and risk encourages predictability and prescription, which limits the (public) emergence of new knowledge. Differential power relations tend to be ignored or set aside in this place so that the status quo is not disturbed. The ‘woman sign’ is a critical space – it points to the contradictions inherent in organization, and at the same time it does not attempt to provide solutions or prescriptions for improvement, because the social issues represented here are too complex for solutions.
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Conclusion If we are going to encourage managers and leaders to use their imaginations, to connect with personal and social emotions and to broaden their alternatives in practice, then as management educators we should at least be trying to do the same. This raises a broader question concerning what can be done to promote the possibilities of critical education? To conclude, I will summarize what I think this involves. I have identified two general principles that inform my practice when I am thinking about how to create suitable environments for learning. First, I ask: what do I need to do in order to hold students in the moment, which is to say to create spaces where students can feel and acknowledge the emotions that underpin both their willingness and their unwillingness to learn? Second, I find that it is important to remember that critical reflection is likely to mobilize the power relations it is seeking to transform. For example, if we want to engage with students about their attempts to negotiate power relations in class, then as tutors we need a corresponding willingness to make our own power visible and discussable. This is not the same as relinquishing authority; it is rather about the importance of reflecting on various ongoing and emerging authority relations in public. In this way, a critical approach to teaching managers and leaders mirrors what we might hope to convey about the critical practice of management and leadership. I have discussed three examples of holding students in the moment and critical reflection. The first provides undergraduate students with direct experience of ten minutes of uncertainty, which produces a wide range of responses that illustrate the complex feelings and reactions that can be mobilized by an apparently simple request. The second shows how a focus on here and now experience in the classroom helps students to reflect on habits and attachments to particular ways of thinking, behaving and acting. The third example illustrates the way in which three spatial arrangements helped to reveal different and intersecting structures and relations of power. Using these examples, I illustrate how I make use of the Business and Management School classroom as an environment for the study of the emotional, relational and political dynamics present in organizations. Such dynamics will vary in how they are felt and expressed, and they will always be contextually specific. However, the examples all try to focus on recurring aspects of individual and collective behaviour in organizations. Reflecting on immediate evidence from their own individual and collective experience in the classroom gives the opportunity for students to view behaviour in the context of wider emotions and power relations. The possibilities of critical education depend on management educators and management students both noticing and interpreting emotional and political dynamics in the Business and Management School classroom. It is important not to look away as we catch glimpses of the power relations that inform peoples’ creativity and their compliance. In particular, the willingness to unsettle current ideas, habits, stuck emotions, defenses and prevailing relations of power offers a more general critique of established views of managing and leading - as activities focused primarily on positive skills and behaviour that are generally applicable. Building critique of established views into the learning experience is integral to expanding alternative ideas about managing and leading in practice.
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